Published On: Wed, Jul 25th, 2012

Somalia’s athletes brave war to train for the Olympics, Video

Most athletes coming to the London Olympics are thinking of medals, writes Jamal Osman. But for Mohamed and Samsam, their greatest achievement was reaching here safely.

Their journey to the Olympics has meant training in the world’s most difficult conditions, dodging bullets and defying death threats.

They are based in Mogadishu, a city devastated by decades of war. The current conflict is between the African Union troops supporting the government, and al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda-allied Islamists.

I went to Somalia last year to meet the athletes and to witness their daily struggle. The athletes, training for the London Games, were using the main road – the frontline – as their running track. They described “as the road of death”.

I was expecting to tell the story of Somalia’s top athlete Abdinasir Ibrahim and his journey to London 2012 – but decades of conflict have deeply affected him.

Killed

His mother and two of his brothers were killed in the war – and this year, his teammate died and Islamists killed the head of Somalia’s Olympic team.

Abdinasir Ibrahim said: “Our Olympic leaders who were helping us died. And safety-wise, running on the road became very difficult for me and that has affected my morale. Mentally.”

His coach said the stress became too much for him. “He started contradicting himself,” Ahmed Ali told me. “Sometime when people talk to him he would get angry and he even burned his running suit saying it was against his religion.”

Despite this, Abdinasir was happy for his replacement – his former training partner Mohamed.

Famous

Standing in Konis Satdium, their new training base, Abdinasir told Mohamed: “Since you are representing all of us, you must lift the Somali name in the eyes of the world. We’ll be supporting you from here.”

Mohamed runs the 1,500 and the 5,000 metres. Since he was chosen to represent Somalia, he’s had to get used to being famous.

“Some clap, some shout ‘here comes the national athlete’ and wish you success. At the same time you will see some saying, ‘where is this crazy man running to?’”

Somalia’s other Olympian is Samsam. Her coach spotted her playing basketball and convinced her to switch to running. As a woman in a very conservative Islamic society, she’s had to fight hard to be accepted as an athlete.

Death threats

She often avoids running on public roads and has even received death threats.

Samsam: “My mother was called on the phone and told that they were aware that I played sports, that I was part of the evil and when I get back to the area will be slaughtered.”

For Samsam’s mother, it has been an emotional journey. Samsam’s father left his family many years ago, so she raised three children alone, selling tea on the streets.

“When she told me the news my whole body lifted up,” said Qamar Shire. “I kissed her on both cheeks and told her, ‘may God make you the top.’”

The whole country is behind them. The day before they left the prime minister invited them to say goodbye. At Mogadishu Airport, everybody wanted a photo with them, including ministers.

We stopped over in Dubai. But even then they were still not sure they would get to London. Travelling as a Somali always raises suspicions. Most of the international community, including Britain, don’t recognise the Somali passport.

So British officials were waiting for the athletes and interviewed them at Dubai Airport. Eventually they allowed them through.

Excited

After they made it on to the flight to London, they began to get excited – watching a film showing London 2012 preparation.

At the gate of Heathrow Airport, Olympic officials were waiting for them, to take them to Stratford. London’s Somali community were there to welcome them like they’ve won gold.

And the community had other plans. They sweep them up and take them to a Somali restaurant in west London rather to the Olympic village.

The Somali athletes are unlikely to get on to the podium, but when they raise Somalia’s flag in the opening ceremony their Olympic dreams will have already come true.

Jamal Osman is an award-winning film maker. His film about Somalia’s Olympic athletes can be seen on Channel 4 News at 7.00pm on Tuesday evening.


About the Author

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There have been no elections in Somalia since 1967 and there won’t be any this year either. But the country has a new parliament (appointed on the advice of clan elders) who have elected a new president, and the new government actually now controls a significant part of the country. The world’s only fully “failed state” may finally be starting to return to normality.A failed state is a horrendous thing: no government, no army, no police, no courts, no law, just bands of armed men taking what they want. Somalia has been like that for more than 20 years, but now there is hope. So much hope that last month the United Nations Security Council partially lifted its embargo on arms sales to Somalia in order to let the new Somali government buy arms, and last week the U.S. government followed suit.The new government replaces the “Transitional Federal Government”, another unelected body that had enjoyed the support of the UN and the African Union for eight pointless years. Then last year a World Bank report demonstrated the sheer scale of its corruption: seven out of every ten dollars of foreign aid vanished into the pockets of TFG officials before reaching the state’s coffers.Fully a quarter of the “national budget” was being absorbed by the offices of the president, the vice-president and the speaker of parliament. The fact that after all that the TFG still only controlled about one square kilometre (less than one square mile) of Mogadishu, the capital, while the rest of the shattered city was run by the Islamist al-Shabaab militia, an affiliate of al-Qaeda, also contributed to the international disillusionment.That tiny patch of ground, moreover, was being defended not by Somali troops but by thousands of Ugandan and Burundian soldiers of the African Union Mission in Somalia (Unisom). More than 500 of them had lost their lives defending the useless TFG, and the foreign donors were losing faith in the mission. But the Unisom soldiers did achieve one major thing: they fought al-Shabaab to a standstill in Mogadishu.In August 2011 the Islamist militia pulled its troops out of the capital. That created an opening, and the international community seized it. It ruthlessly initiated a process designed to push the TFG aside: Somali clan elders were asked to nominate members for a new 250-seat parliament, which was then asked to vote for a new president and government.It was obviously impossible to hold a free election in a country much of which was still under al-Shabaab’s control, but this process also had the advantage that it allowed the foreigners to shape the result. The corrupt officials who had run the old TFG all re-applied for their old jobs, but none of them succeeded.The new president who emerged from this process, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is a former academic and human rights worker who only entered politics in 2011. No whiff of corruption clings to him, and he has worked tirelessly to bring about national reconciliation. And he has the wind at his back: just after he was chosen last September, a Kenyan force evicted al-Shebaab from Somalia’s second city, Kismayo.That still leaves about 95 percent of the country’s territory and three-quarters of its population beyond the government’s direct control. Al-Shabaab still rules in most rural parts of the country, and Ethiopian troops and their militia allies control much of the western border areas. Pirates with a lot of guns and money effectively dominate much of the north.One whole chunk of the country, calling itself Somaliland, has declared its independence (and runs its affairs much more peacefully and efficiently than any other part of Somalia). No other country recognizes its independence at the moment, but it used to be a British colony, quite separate from Italian-ruled Somalia, and in principle it can make exactly the same case for independence as Eritrea did when it broke away from Ethiopia.The worst problem facing President Mohamud is the venal and cunning politicians who have exploited the clan loyalties that pervade every aspect of Somali life to carve out their own little empires. Some are frankly and unashamedly warlords; others, including all the senior officials in the defunct TFG, masquerade as national politicians but work for their own interests.They have not gone away, nor have the clan rivalries that kept the fighting going for 21 years. Drawing up the rules and sharing out the power for a new federal Somalia (none of which has yet been decided) will give them plenty of opportunities to make trouble for the new president and regain their former power. Mohamud definitely has his work cut out for him.Nevertheless, he has strong UN and African Union support, and he now has a chance to create a spreading zone of peace in the country and start rebuilding national institutions. So last week the United States declared that it was now willing to provide military aid, including arms exports, to Somalia. Weirdly, that actually means that thing are looking up in the world’s only failed state.Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.